Digital Foundry is currently en route to GDC 2015, so there won't be a new article published today. However, as we make the long journey across to San Francisco, we're reminded of the first - and possibly the best - GDC talk we saw. That would be then-Naughty Dog Richard Lemarchand's hour-long journey into the making of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, a title that remains one of the greatest games released in the last-gen era. A remarkably insightful talk that gave us fantastic background into the way Naughty Dog worked, we couldn't help but think that the presentation would translate into a great feature - and to this day this remains one of our favourite pieces. Originally published on the March 20th 2010, this is an article we're happy to share with you again.

Speaking at GDC 2010, Naughty Dog lead game designer Richard Lemarchand gave a candid presentation on the development of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves - a post-mortem of the game-making process that covered, in his own words, "what went right and what blew up in our faces like a red explosive barrel!"

Just one face in a crowd of hundreds, it's a unique opportunity to get a glimpse at the game-making philosophies and techniques of one of the world's leading developers. Here we recap the session in detail and expand upon it with Naughty Dog's assistance and our own unique visual assets. Enjoy!

In retrospect, it's a wonder no-one had thought of it before. In 1984 the incumbent Conservative government passed the Video Recordings Act; video nasties, a pet topic of those renowned moral guardians, the tabloid newspapers, were to become an endangered species. As the appointed adjudicators of who got to watch what, the British Board Of Film Classification suddenly became very busy people. It was now a legal requirement for all films and videos to carry a BBFC classification, unless they fell under the exempt category of either sport, music, religion or educational. Oh, and computer games didn't count either. Well, not really.

That's not to say by 1984 that computer games hadn't had their fair share of controversy. But generally the graphical ability and simple gameplay of contemporary games had rarely been seen as critical enough to warrant attention outside of the dedicated gaming press. Two years later, London-based software house CRL Group released a nondescript text adventure game for the Commodore 64 called Pilgrim. The game was unremarkable, and drew criticism for its lack of graphics at a time when even budget adventures were proudly showing off detailed vistas.

The one area Pilgrim did receive praise for was its atmosphere and story, the work of author and adventure game fan Rod Pike from East Anglia, who had sent the game to CRL on the off-chance it would publish it. "Pilgrim was a dark and gothic piece," says CRL founder Clem Chambers, "and we therefore logically thought, let's ask Rod to do a horror game."

This one took us by surprise. A study undertaken by US pollmeisters Nielsen revealed this week that "better resolution" is the top reason people bought PlayStation 4 over its competition. It's a remarkable, perhaps even unbelievable result, and one we wanted to dig into more deeply, so we contacted the director of Nielsen Games, Nicole Pike, asking about the size and make-up of the sample and how respondents were directed into giving their answers.

Pike tells us that data for the report was collected using "Nielsen's proprietary, high-quality online panel in the United States". Two waves of data were collected, the first between November 7th and November 12th, 2014. The second came a couple of months later, from January 22nd to January 27th, 2015. In terms of the demographic make-up of each sample, wave one consisted of around 2,000 teens and adults aged over 13, along with 400 kids aged between six and 12. The second wave consisted of a further 2,000 teens/adults aged over 13.

"Post-survey, raw data was weighted to ensure representation of the US general population based on current US census data," Pike added.

Somewhere down the line in my life I sat in a rented room in Kuala Lumpur watching a Sim approximation of the rapper Drake grumble and fix a broken toilet.

I made a Sims 4 neighbourhood from my Spotify playlists: Drake and Nicki Minaj in one house together, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears and Andy Samberg in another house with my own Sim Cara.

Because Drake and Nicki create their own lyrical fanfic in which they 'ship' each other, I made both their Sims flirt over breakfast, over the grand piano I had only just managed to buy on Drake's terrible Amateur Entertainer job for $23 an hour (probably his Degrassi years) and on the red velvet couch I primarily bought because it belonged in a Cash Money video.

Dungeon of the Endless, Subnautica - quite a lot of Early Access video games start with spaceships in flames, hurtling artfully towards strange planets, bound for tales of peril and survival. Possibly this is just the best way to kick off a narrative that will involve crafting and permadeath, two of this era's greatest loves. Partly, though, it seems a tacit acknowledgement of how so many people feel about Early Access in general - that it is the place where bright promise burns up, where landing sites become graves.

This isn't the case, of course. For every high profile botch, there's the flowering of something strange and special that traditional development models might have accidentally crushed. Forget Godus, then, and forget The Stomping Ground: here are some of the current crop of Early Access games that seem to be delivering on their promises.

You need precision and you need keen strategy to be a spy - at least you need that to be the kind of spy you get in the movies. Klei seems entirely up to the job, taking the deliriously wonderful premise of a turn-based espionage game, and delivering it via regular updates, two a month, generally alternating between small and big patches, so you're never far away from getting something special.

The PlayStation 4 release of Dark Souls 2 is poised to be the best way to revisit Drangleic on console - a true 1080p title adorned with countless visual upgrades over last-gen. However, the Scholar of the First Sin remaster is also due for PC; a DirectX 11 reworking that adds many of the enhancements seen on PS4. With access to more powerful hardware, this could make it the definitive release, but as PC owners already enjoy the current game at 1080p60 and beyond, is the upgrade really necessary?

Having dissected the Forest of Fallen Giants area already, we now focus on larger, wider locales like Heide's Towering Flame and No-Man's Wharf. We boot up the original PC version (with all settings set to high, and no mods) to see how these levels stack up against Scholar of the First Sin on PS4. Both are played side-by-side to show From Software's efforts to remix the formula - a state of affairs that shows some promise for the forthcoming upgraded PC release.

The enemy placements in each area are the most noticeable change to the game. As a well-versed example, Heide's Tower of Flame consists of the same giant knights that Dark Souls 2 fans will remember, each in the same position. But dispersed between them are new, dormant knights who rouse based on your progress through the game overall - or if attacked. Winding your way up to the blue cathedral, a giant wyvern also now sprawls in front of the raised drawbridge - a real curveball for those expecting just another knight.

Fable Legends is developer Lionhead's first free-to-play game, and marks a significant departure from previous entries in the series not only in terms of gameplay, but how customers will pay for it.

Much like Riot with its hugely successful MOBA League of Legends, Lionhead will rotate the heroes that will be available to play for free in Fable Legends, but also let players unlock them for permanent use by spending the in-game currency or real world money.

Arcades, despite reports to the contrary, can still be sticky-floored palaces of splendour, where bright blazing machines happily gobble up your loose coins in exchange for experiences you'd never be able to get at home. They still exude a certain magic, though perhaps not at 10am on a wet Wednesday morning, which is when I find myself traipsing along London's Embankment to Namco's Funscape park.

The arcade feels like it's blinking into life, the only clients a handful of those strange men who carry around their personal effects in flimsy orange Sainsbury's bags and gather around fruit machines, and a thinly dispersed group of schoolchildren, all wondering why there's a tired-looking 33-year-old man on the OutRun 2 cabinet shouting 'Eleganza!' as he nails the tricky switchback on Cloudy Highland.

It was a brief, essential diversion before checking out what I'd come to see: Bandai Namco's Star Wars Battle Pod, the monumental new cabinet that started making its way in to arcades last month. Placed towards the back of Namco Funscape, beyond the dodgems and the bowling alley and all those ticket redemption games, it's an imposing machine, the colossal cabinet putting you in mind of sit-down Sega classics such as G-Loc, OutRun or Space Harrier.

David Pittman's follow-up to Eldritch isn't a sequel. It's an inversion.

Eldritch was an action roguelike that dropped you into a world built of procedural mayhem and oddly appealing Cthulhian horrors. Neon Struct is a stealth game in which no element of the environment has been left to chance - and its horrors are entirely human. "Eldritch for me was a lot about taking all the lessons I had already learned from my time especially at 2K Marin," Pittman tells me as I play through an early three-level build of his latest game. "I programmed AI for BioShock 2, and Eldritch was my version of doing a BioShock kind of game. I had a very short space of time to make it and so I did everything that I already knew how to do." He pauses. "For Neon Struct I'm actually trying to expand a little bit beyond that. I want to try and tell a story that's a little more meaningful. I want to learn about level design."

One thing both games do have in common is the very basis of their aesthetics - even if the whole thing's been warped in a very different direction this time around. Eldritch used metre-long cubes to cobble together dungeons, sand palaces, and a terrifyingly complex library that remains one of my favourite hub worlds in any game, ever. Neon Struct still uses the same building blocks, and it still sets its sights on an architecture of fear, but it's the kind of creeping fear that can occasionally take hold while walking Washington DC's National Mall on your own - the fear that comes from exploring a place that resembles a college campus designed by the secret police. "I was reusing the voxel engine that I made for Eldritch," explains Pittman, "so everything was going to be cubes and right angles and things like that. I was looking at what sort of architecture I could do that would look natural built from that sort of thing. And there's a style of architecture called Brutalism - big shapes, poured concrete. It's simple but it's imposing and it does have that sort of mid-20th century government building feel to it. Especially in the US. It feels kind of terrifying."

This is an early impressions piece based on playing through the first episode of Resident Evil Revelations 2. We'll have a full review once all episodes are live in the middle of March.

The first motivation behind a spin-off is money. But what comes after, especially if you're the creatives tasked with giving another angle on a popular series? In the case of Resident Evil: Revelations the answer was fan-service - albeit quality fan-service - with original protagonists Chris and Jill reunited, a cruise ship that somehow contained pieces of the Arklay Mansion, and a script so full of clunkers it almost seemed deliberate. Some Resident Evil spin-offs have been stinkers, but Revelations wasn't one of them - and this sequel might turn out to be even better.

I say 'might' because, with a first episode clocking in at just under two hours and a currently-offline Raid mode, Revelations 2's biggest problem is simply that it isn't complete. With the future episodes following over the course of the next month you wonder why this structure is being used at all, and it's doubly annoying that the retail release has significant exclusive content. It's as if Capcom is trying to discourage buying Revelations 2 on release, and encourage waiting. I don't get the strategy here, but whatever.

A Bézier curve is a curve that runs between a series of control points. When you move the points, the curve moves too. It's a handy way of getting computers to draw bendy lines.

I didn't know any of that when I woke up this morning - and it's probably wrong, knowing me - but then, when I woke up this morning I hadn't played Bezier, a game that's absolutely in love with the Bézier curve. Bezier uses these curves to explore an interaction between digital and analogue worlds. The curves are right inside the heart of the game. "I use them in everything," explains Bezier's designer, Philip Bak. "The sound, the graphics, the story."

Béziers are cool, I think: a neat mathematical idea I can almost get a handle on, and one that will hopefully allow me to casually drop the term Bernstein polynomials into conversation, before staring out of the window with a misty look in my eyes. Thankfully, Bezier is also extremely cool. You don't need to know anything about maths to enjoy it. It's a hectic twin-stick shooter that has effortlessly swallowed my entire morning, and is probably going to eat up most of the evening too.

"All the viewers that are watching, this is a glitch to get your characters above 20, I guess," 11-year-old Henry Kramer told his viewers on Twitch.

Destiny was Henry's favourite game. He played online with his school friends in the evenings and had poured countless hours into Bungie's online space shooter since he had received a PlayStation 4 for Christmas.

Henry had not one, but three Destiny characters - one for each of the game's character classes. His Warlock was level 31 - just a few in-game materials away from the current level cap. He also had a level 26 Titan and was currently working on levelling his 23 rank Hunter.

Editor's note: This retrospective was originally published in September 2010, and we're returning to it this weekend to celebrate the imminent release of Homeworld: Remastered, which is due on PC next week.

There are games that we love to play and then there are games that we love to... well, just love. Above all others Homeworld has established a place in my heart that will likely only ever be relinquished should its achievements become the norm rather than the rare exception in gaming.

Released in 1999, it tells the story of the people of Kharak, an isolated planet at the far edges of the galaxy. Upon the discovery of a relic buried deep underground, they come to learn that they are in fact exiles on their planet. For over 60 years, the population unites and devotes itself to building a starship capable of carrying them home. You enter the game as this Mothership prepares to make its maiden test flight.

Conventional logic dictates that when one creates a product, they should make it available to the widest market possible. How else can one explain the popularity of mobile games being produced in the modern era? Yet Killer Queen developers Nikita Mikros and Joshua DeBonis have gone the opposite route by creating an arcade cabinet-exclusive that very few have the opportunity to play.

It's a quirky proposition for an even quirkier game. Killer Queen's concept of a five vs five strategy game/minimalist platformer eschews conventional arcade game design in a lot of ways that seem ludicrous, but are secretly brilliant.

On the surface, Killer Queen has everything stacked against it. Besides being currently limited to five public locations across the United States, it requires a minimum of eight people to really get a good game going. That's a lot of people to round up! Furthermore, it's a completely new IP with no familiar template from which to draw from. And finally, it's just plain confounding to play - at least at first.

Due out on April 7th, Dark Souls 2 makes its PlayStation 4 and Xbox One debut with Scholar of the First Sin - a new edition that tweaks enemy positions, adds a new thread to its story, and ties together all updates and DLC chapters released so far. Part remix, part remaster, both platforms also boost its visuals and frame-rate to a level we haven't seen before on console. We can expect texture updates and a bump to 1080p of course - but comparisons with last-gen also show some surprising twists elsewhere.

For this analysis we're looking at the gold master PS4 code, letting us form a clear impression of the end product ahead of its release, though the obligatory day one patch could perhaps see minor improvements at launch (with our menu reading version 1.00, calibrations 2.00). Early access at this stage comes with some caveats that fall into line with Bandai Namco's marketing strategy for the title - specifically that we focus on the Forest of Fallen Giants area for now, though it's fair to say it's a sizeable chunk of the game that gives the engine a firm workout.

The early sentiment is this: Dark Souls 2 on PS4 is not entirely flawless in its delivery, but nevertheless, it is the best-looking incarnation of the game to date. A pixel count shows up a perfect 1920x1080 resolution, something we also hope to verify on Xbox One on launch. That's also backed by post-process anti-aliasing that matches the FXAA technique seen on the existing PC release. Compared to last-gen standard, the upgrade in clarity from 720p is considerable.

Ted Nugent's Stranglehold is a nine-minute beast of a song, a deeply sinister trip to the dark side with a guy who just doesn't know when to quit. The very first line - "Here I come again now, baby / Like a dog in heat" - sets a certain cards-on-table tone. But in addition to its signature juggernaut riff, shred in tooth and claw, Stranglehold also features a long, sparse mid-section powered by a rubber-band bassline. It's during this spooky longueur that the Nuge - or you, if you're playing Guitar Hero World Tour - wrings out odd guitar wails and bursts of distorted squall. It's one of those solos that goes on so long that you almost forget it's part of an actual song, until Ted pops up again, singing hoarsely: "Some people think they gonna die someday / I got news, ya never gotta go." It's an unsettling gospel of everlasting life, preached by a dude who, when he's not generating intensities in ten cities, enjoys shooting flaming arrows. It's also totally brilliant.

Critics like to talk about rock immortality, usually attaching it to the geniuses who leave us too soon: your Hendrixes, your Cobains, your Buckleys. For a while, it looked like the Guitar Hero franchise was going to achieve something comparable - maybe not inventing a brand new genre of rhythm action game, but certainly perfecting and dominating it. The first installment came out at the tail end of 2005 and within 12 months Guitar Hero was a global phenomenon. Five years later, it seemed to simply run out of puff, defeated by the shifting player tastes that also kneecapped its sturdy rival Rock Band. Guitar Hero is dead, essentially, but deserves to be on the cover of Mojo magazine, if only for services to classic rock, introducing a whole new generation to Tom Petty, the Edgar Winter Group and Creedence Clearwater Revival.

But rather than canonising Guitar Hero, anecdotally it feels like former players have a mild sense of embarrassment about all those hours spent doing rock karoake, as if it represented something faddish and ephemeral like collecting Pogs or nursemaiding Tamagotchi. It probably didn't help that the game arrived so perfectly formed, so sui generis, that (subsequent addition of drums and vocals aside) there really wasn't anywhere for it to go. But did we all just stop enjoying it? Was there a moment where, collectively, we looked at the make-believe guitars leaning against our sleek home entertainment centres and thought, in the immortal words of Mark Knopfler, "that ain't working"?

Famous for pushing the boundaries of Sony's PSP platform, The Order: 1886 demonstrates what developer Ready at Dawn is truly capable of from a technological standpoint when working with more powerful, modern hardware. While interactivity, run-time and replayability have dominated the headlines this week, what shouldn't be forgotten is just how much of a technological leap the game represents. Indeed, by focusing on such a tight, focused experience, Ready at Dawn is given the freedom to push visual boundaries in new and exciting ways, without the issues faced by larger open world experiences.

The Order: 1886 is based on an in-house tile-based forward renderer - or forward+ as it's often designated - designed from the ground up for PlayStation 4 with full multi-threading and physically-based rendering as key foundation points. It's a highly flexible renderer with easy to use support for multiple BRDFs (bidirectional reflectance distribution functions) allowing for a highly flexible materials pipeline. This approach allows developers to quickly create and place objects within the game world that look and behave realistically. Physically-based rendering has become increasingly popular in modern engines but there's still an art to its implementation - and it's here where Ready at Dawn has really delivered.

Clean image quality is a key factor in delivering a strong filmic look and The Order: 1886 turns in a solid performance here. One of the first controversies surrounding the game is its 2.40:1 aspect ratio which renders fewer pixels while maintaining 1:1 pixel mapping on native 1080p displays. With its accompanying, rather heavy post-processing pipeline, there are compelling arguments that this approach doesn't produce results substantially better than sub-native titles like Ryse at 900p but, in motion, finer details are visible and fewer subpixel artefacts interfere with the image. The image is predominately soft, but more subtle sharp details still manage to shine through, creating a nice contrast. It may not be to everyone's taste but The Order: 1886 features some of the best image quality you'll find on console at the moment.

Hello! Chris Donlan here. David Goldfarb, our regular columnist, is away this week, so I've asked Rob Fearon to write something instead and he has very kindly agreed. Rob designs wonderful arcade games such as DRM (which does not include DRM) and he is also a brilliant writer. I know: what a massive jerk. I really hope you enjoy what he's come up with today. Also, look at THIS.

I grew up in an all too typical 1980's northern town. Factories closed, unemployment rose. First friends of the family left jobless, then my parents. The stinking grey skies a reminder that the wheels of industry still turned close, the lack of food in the cupboard and the tears and upset a constant reminder of how out of reach most work in the area remained.

I got a Spectrum when I was younger, before the work and the money ran dry. I'd rush home from school to play Jetpac, Jet Set Willy, Jumping Jack and other games beginning with J. I loved playing games but I never felt like I could actually write the things. Sure, I'd tinker with The Quill to make hilarious (not actually hilarious) adventure games (for the kids that's what we'd now call "interactive fiction" or what a subset of idiots would call "not a game"), then there was HURG, GAC and SEUCK and other tools with awful acronyms designed to help make making games easier. In the main they were too limited or too difficult for me to use. Besides, I really liked playing games and making them seriously cuts into the time you can spend doing that, yeah?

The Order: 1886 offers a relatively short single-player campaign (Martin finished it in around seven hours), with little in terms of replayability. Is that worth the full £50 price tag? Should we care about the value of video games?

I'm joined by both Martin and Wes in the video below, who weigh in with two differing opinions.

The Order: 1886 may well prove to be a highly divisive title - but for all its controversies, we're equally confident that it represents something very special, a sneak-peek at the future direction of real-time graphics on console hardware. Ready at Dawn's visual technology is simply immense: so good, so precise, so realistic that at times it's like you're playing a game that looks as good as a pre-rendered movie. This is a milestone in the development of next-gen visuals.

Implementing the very latest rendering technologies and integrating them with a superb level of consistency throughout the rendering pipeline, this is clearly a stunning visual showcase. Every element of the scene, from environmental materials to clothing, hair and skin is exceptionally rendered, beautifully lit according to how light interacts with their physical properties. There's little - if anything - in the way of hard geometric edges to give this game an old-school gaming aesthetic, while the more traditional high detail texture work found in most games gives way to a softer, more filmic look.

Effects work is lavish, rendered at a high quality, but without any single effect standing out over the others. There's a pleasing consistency in the quality of the rendering we've not seen here since Crytek's Ryse - camera and per-object motion blur along with a high quality depth of field effect blend perfectly into a rendering pipeline where every element has its place, enhancing the cinematic nature of the scene. Jaggies are mostly non-existent owing to the excellent anti-aliasing, but we're unsure bout the technique utilised here. Ready at Dawn's graphics presentations to the industry mention the use of 4x MSAA, but there's the odd manifestation of shimmer on edges and very rare sub-pixel break-up, hinting that a post-process AA technique may be in play.

]]>http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-the-order-1886-performance-analysis
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1737726Thu, 19 Feb 2015 15:00:00 +0000How a nasty tumble in China led to the birth of a new developer

How's this for a video game origin story? Around seven years ago, Mark Major, a New Zealand university student working in China, was crossing the road when the ground opened up and swallowed him.

"I was going down to get a bottle of water from the local convenience store," he tells me. "I was living on a very busy street in Beijing, full of restaurants and those lanterns they put out at night. I just went down to the store, and that was my last memory."

Major woke up in a hole, about nine metres deep. Situated right next to the convenience store, this hole had been covered in plastic - plastic that Beijing's acid rain had steadily eaten into. While Major has no memory of the fall itself - not even the crash through a piece of wood on the way down that slowed his descent and probably saved his life - he will never forget the hour that followed.

Loot is the new level up. A few years ago, people posted about their fourth prestige on Facebook, most probably humming Call of Duty's butt-rock progression jingle as they did so. Come 2015, and my Twitter feed is cut with great swathes of pictures of Destiny's tooled-up future-warriors, owners boasting about their new exotic codpiece, screenshots saturated by more purple than a Prince album cover.

When Borderlands became a hit, haughty nerds like me positively vibrated with surprise that a loot game could capture public imagination. Men and women weaned on Diablo's click 'n' collect appeal suddenly saw the thrill of an unexpected stat buff transformed into the lure of Gearbox's (admittedly shaky) bazillion gun promise.

Bungie's troubled masterpiece is the last link in that chain - the proof is in the pudding, and you can be sure that Activision are dining out on their 16 million-player dessert. It's a game steeped as much in swirling sets of metagame calculations as it is the Halo nostalgia that powers its combat. When an RPG, halfway through, starts making loot the only way to level up, you know something's changed.

Editor's Note: This is an early impressions piece to coincide with the launch of Total War: Attilla today. We'll have a full review, taking into consideration the day one patch, later this week.

There's a lot riding on the arrival of Total War: Attila. While the eponymous anti-hero and fearsome leader of the Huns is borne on box and horse alike, this title also carries with it the hopes of the long-running series' significant fan base. After the learning process necessitated by Total War: Rome 2's post-release incremental updates, this is The Creative Assembly and Sega's chance to prove their reach no longer exceeds their grasp, and they can launch a stable, balanced and content-rich title straight off the bat.

Of course, it's not just about existing fans, as any long-running series requires an injection of new blood to maintain momentum. It's always interesting seeing how established franchises is how well they deliver their concepts to new recruits while still offering the depth to maintain interest over scores if not hundreds of hours of play.

Darkest Dungeon is the antidote to all those cheery heroics in other games. You think it'd be fun, actually going into the bowels of the Earth and fighting undead hordes, slobbering maggots, giant spiders, and your own mortal fears. Not so much. It's a game of fighting evil, yes, but also depression, mental collapse, and fear of both the dark and the fear of the unknown, all wrapped into a simple side-scrolling RPG made no less morbid by smacking somewhat of more pleasant games like Bookworm Adventures and Mario and Luigi. It's a place where the traditional trinity of tank, healer and DPS really needs a fourth member, therapist, for those moments when the healer suddenly decides that pain is fascinating, or becomes masochistic enough to demand the monsters give them their share of agony.

All of this isn't simply a little aesthetic flavour, but a big reason that Darkest Dungeon works so well. It's morbid, but not without a sense of dark glee, balancing a world that makes Diablo's look like Center Parcs with a presentation that makes it fun to explore. The snarling character portraits. The deliciously hammy narration. The increasingly insane hollerings from your team as they go from variably heroic hopefuls to broken husks. In a game like XCOM, it's common sense that everyone should stay alive, that they might get stronger and better.That's largely true here too, in that time and experience can hone even the simplest jester from a feral opportunist with a talent for sticking in the knife to a slobbering killing machine.

It is always a treat to speak with Eugene Jarvis - even when it is over a wobbly Skype video call early in the morning, and even when he was out partying in Helsinki the night before. "The party was still going at 8am," he says, blinking. "It's crazy. We were just talking about games the whole night. It's kind of quiet and dark in Helsinki, but the people are amazing and vivacious. It feels like this entire city is about video games. I mean everywhere you walk there are video game companies and video gamers, it's just insane."

The reason the legendary arcade designer is in Helsinki is equally insane, thankfully. Eugene Jarvis is collaborating with Housemarque on a new video game: the creator of Robotron and Defender is getting together with the people behind Super Stardust and Resogun. When I first heard the news last Thursday, I'm ashamed to say that I made an involuntary squealing sound that no human being should ever have to hear. (Actually, I'm not ashamed at all.)

Jarvis can't tell me very much about the game yet, but that can all wait. Here's footage of him reacting to the latest prototype:

A school where kids make video games: we used to get the cane for even imagining that when I were a lad. That's why when "the UK's first gaming school" flashes across my inbox, I know I have to get to Liverpool to see it.

A brisk walk down the River Mersey, past the docks, past The Beatles Story, and I'm there. On the surface it's an abandoned old-brick warehouse district. There's a graffitid skate park, a Jamaican hole-in-the-wall caterer. It would make for a great film set. But in the imposing factory of a building over the road lurks The Studio, the school - and it looks as little like a school on the inside as it does on the outside. There's exposed brickwork, pipework and chunky wooden beams. There's a sloping cinema room with big red comfy seats for assemblies and films. There's an arcade machine, free breakfast, even a crypt. Why did my schools have to look like asylums? Even "The Studio" name is cool.

The students file in at 9am and they're a smart lot, all blazers and business attire, all conscientious looking - no trainers instead of shoes, no ties tucked away in hard-man defiance. They're aged between 14 and 19 years old. Today is games day. That's not every day (more on that later), but today they show returning mentors how far they are with their games. And it's impressive stuff.

Over the past few years the high-definition remaster has become a popular way to enjoy classic games, using more powerful hardware to deliver an enhanced, higher performance experience. Looking back, Sony Santa Monica's brilliant God of War Collection in 2009 was clearly the catalyst for this new trend, but the reality is that id Software produced a remarkable 1080p60 HD remaster that shipped at launch alongside the Xbox 360 four years prior. The game? Quake 2.

During a recent binge on retro games, we found ourselves marvelling at various console conversions of classic id shooters. The Xbox 360 conversion of Quake 2 was released exclusively as a bonus disc packaged with the horrific Quake 4, and we were impressed by what we found: an optimised 1080p, 60 frames per second rendition of the classic id shooter, released at a time when the console itself was physically incapable of producing a full HD output - which may explain why its charms were overlooked at the time.

Coded predominantly by id (now Nvidia) programmer Brian Harris, Quake 2 for Xbox 360 started life as a simple conversion, more than likely a minor project that allowed id to test the waters on what was then 'next-gen' console development. Of course, by the time the Xbox 360 launched, Quake 2 was already eight years old and not exactly an impressive technical showcase, so the undoubted quality of the console port may not seem like a huge achievement. However, as we've seen time and again, reproducing an original game on a different architecture can reveal unforeseen challenges, resulting in a poor conversion. In the case of Quake 2, id was able to achieve things that few other games on the system would ever manage, including support for 1080p output - a hardware feature that would elude the console until September 2006, when support was added via a firmware update.

"We'll have to jump for it," says Jowy Atreides as you stand side-by-side upon the clifftop. Before long, your unscrupulous captain and his Highland Army dissenters will storm the hill and finish you off. You've been done over by the establishment, one you once served so dutifully, and are now forced to make a decision that will eventually tear your friendship apart. You'll return to this same spot much further down the line, but will the system have warped you into a different person by then? That'll ultimately depend on the choices you make from hereon in. In the meantime though, you close your eyes, take a deep breath, and throw yourself into the river below.

The opening 20 minutes of Suikoden 2 is quite something. Almost at once, the player-named hero turns loyal soldier of the Junior Brigade, to enemy of the state, whilst parting ways with his closest friend along the way. His company is an overnight stay away from returning home, and the protagonist looks forward to reuniting with his sister. Instead he winds up on the run. In just 20 minutes, or thereabouts, we're shown themes of love, of loss, of friendship, of family, of uncertainty, of deception, of political and socio-political unrest, and of corruption - in less time than some modern titles take to conclude an opening cutscene.

When it arrived on European shores in 2000, Suikoden 2 entered a western world newly accustomed to three dimensional JRPGs, thanks to Final Fantasy 7 and its successor. Critics received it positively and those who gave it a shot are still talking about it today. But 2D sprites? In the 21st century? This proved too much for most, a fact echoed by the game's disenchanting sales worldwide.

Previous builds of Turtle Rock's Evolve showed promise, thanks to the combination of impressive CryEngine-powered visuals and a unique take on the traditional team-based multi-player shooter - but at the same time the experience was let down by technical issues ranging from slow and inconsistent matchmaking to unstable netcode, leading to player disconnects. Launching with a massive 3GB day one update that promises to fix a wide range of bugs, alongside performance improvements, the good news is that the final version of Evolve provides a significantly better online experience than the pre-release code you may have already played.

Matchmaking across all formats is improved, with waiting times that usually take between a few seconds to two minutes, while lobby disconnects occur less frequently - though they are not completely eliminated. The Xbox One and PC versions of the game feel the most polished in these areas, with increased stability compared to the PS4 version. For example, matchmaking is a more inconsistent experience on Sony's system, often leaving you waiting between five and 20 minutes when things don't aren't quite working as they should. Rebooting the game usually takes care of the problem, although we noticed that the same problem usually crops up again after a few faultless matches.

General online performance during gameplay is also more stable, resulting in fewer disconnections and crashes, although both problems still appear on occasion. The end result is that the experience feels smoother and generally more consistent to play than before, with technical hiccups less frequently impacting the enjoyment of the game. That said, there are still a few issues: monsters have a tendency to clip through scenery on occasion during combat, while frame-rates often stutter heavily when a player is placed into an existing match, particularly if you get spawned right in the heart of battle. At one point we were also confronted with a major rendering bug on the Xbox One that projected environment shadows in mid air, flickering and floating in and out of view. Thankfully we only encountered this issue once over several hours of play, and it resolved itself on the next respawn.

The story of how Peter Molyneux got his big break in the games industry is revealing. After his first game The Entrepreneur failed to sell, Molyneux gave up on games and started exporting baked beans to the Middle East. Soon afterwards Commodore, confusing Molyneux's company Taurus with a networking company called Torus, flew him to the States and mistakenly offered him ten brand-new Amigas.

"I remember it vividly going through my head," says Molyneux . "There was like an angel and a devil on my shoulder. One saying 'Go on you've got to tell the truth, you can't lie like this.' Then this other voice saying 'Just lie. Just lie, get the machines, and sort it out afterwards.' Of course, I ended up lying."

What would you have done? I like to think I'd have been a big enough man to come clean, but without being in that situation it's impossible to say.

This week's release of Super Stardust Ultra on PlayStation 4 amounts to more than a simple port of the Housemarque's twin-stick classic - a game already running at full HD and 60 frames per second on PS3. A full eight years later, new developer D3T takes the call to make an updated version, adding new modes and visual enhancements along the way - but given that the game already stood as an effects and physics showcase on last-gen, just how much more does the Ultra edition add?

First off, it's worth pointing out that while the the PS4 title is not a direct port of the excellent Super Stardust HD on PS3, it's fair to say that the vast majority of the original game's rendering underpinnings are transferred across with only a modicum of improvements bearing in mind the generational leap in hardware spec. Similar to the fully patched last-gen release, Ultra runs at true 1080p with a 60fps target - enhanced with 4x multi-sampling anti-aliasing on some surfaces - with rare support for stereoscopic 3D maintained in this new release too. [UPDATE 13/2/15 17:00: Reviewing the assets, it looks like Ultra actually deploys 4x MSAA as opposed to a post-process solution, though some of the effects work appears to compromise the effect.]

This is essentially the full PS3 release, bolstered by new modes to make more of the PS4's feature-set. Chief among them is interactive streaming, a broadcast-based survival mode allowing spectators to impact your run via votes - either opting for boosts to aid you, or a spike in enemy spawns to make life more difficult. Given the console's focus on social features, it's a nice touch, though a bona fide online multiplayer mode would have been more welcome here. Other additions could have easily made the cut on PS3, such as the rudimentary ship editor, or the simpler single-player modes such as Impact and Blockade.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1736742Fri, 13 Feb 2015 15:00:00 +0000Homeworld is where the heart is

2015 could well be the year of the remaster. With Resident Evil HD Remaster setting digital sales records, Grim Fandango Remastered bringing arguably the greatest adventure game in history to a modern audience for the first time in 16 years, and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D updating the curious classic to a popular handheld, there's no better time to catch up on the the seminal pieces of gaming we missed out on the first time around.

This time around we've got Gearbox, the studio simultaneously beloved for Borderlands and reviled for Duke Nukem Forever and Aliens: Colonial Marines, bringing its hand to updating Relic's epic 3D strategy series Homeworld with Homeworld Remastered Collection.

This is really a passion project for Gearbox's chief creative officer, Brian Martel, who convinced his colleagues that the studio should spend $1.35m to acquire the Homeworld license after its former publisher THQ went bust.

During the early afternoon of 26th May 2013, 18-year-old Scot Bryan Henderson tapped on Peter Molyneux's Curiosity cube for the last time. He had won the game.

A tiny message appeared on the screen of his smartphone. It contained an email address for someone at 22Cans, the Guildford studio Molyneux had founded after leaving Microsoft and traditional game development behind.

Bryan, confused but intrigued, followed the instructions. Have I really won, he asked? An email appeared with a link to a video. In it Molyneux, dressed all in black and set against a virtual cube, delivers a message of congratulations.

The pre-release period has not been kind to Evolve, Turtle Rock's post Left 4 Dead 'second album'. The recent alpha preview did it few favours, crippled by broken matchmaking and offering a confusing and unbalanced game of cats ganging up against a rather large mouse. I spent almost every match during the alpha just walking through forests not doing anything of any interest whatsoever. Combine that with one of the most misguided, muddled and overly verbose pre-release content campaigns in history, and Evolve isn't off to the best of starts.

What Turtle Rock's shooter actually offers is far simpler than this befuddling maelstrom of bad information and tedious buzzwords sought to represent. It's a game about four players shooting a monster. It just so happens to be a monster that's controlled by another human. There are great subtleties, nuance, balance and a handful of other rules, of course, but that's the elevator pitch.

As promised then, Evolve gives you the option to team up with three other players in a Monster hunt, or to actually jump into the scaly skin of the beast itself. Clearly, the latter is the most instantly appealing. The first monster on the unlock scale, The Goliath, is simple enough to control. You can bound about the vast maps in third person, clambering up sheer cliff faces with ease and generally feeling rather happy with yourself.

You can play through United Game Artists' Rez from beginning to end in less than an hour, which, in an age where size depressingly does matter to so many, could be seen as a slight against this music-infused rail shooter. That hour, though, comes closer to perfection than any other video game I know.

What wonders that 60 minutes holds: the vector-lit void that slowly fills with dancing detail, the first ripple cascade of beats that builds towards anthemic euphoria, the running man. The sweet skunk thud of Joujouka's track that builds up to Rez's most iconic boss at the climax of level four, or the desolation of the level that follows, moodily soundtracked by Adam Freeland's Fear is the Mind Killer. The moment when you MDMA rush out of the sea, towards a sky squirming with cannon fodder as a suite of stuttering, swirling strings giddily charts your ascent.

Or the end of the third level, as you dance alongside a swarm of bots, the firewalls that protect the boss tumbling dramatically down. It's true that, with a bleakly reductionist view, Rez is simply a successor to more earnest fare such as Panzer Dragoon, only in which your arsenal is transmuted to drum machines and synthesisers, where cannon fire is switched out for 808 thumps and missiles are swapped for high energy 303 stabs.

Less than one month from now, the Game Developers Conference - GDC - kicks off in San Francisco. Aside from the reveal of Sony's Project Morpheus VR concept last year, the show has been short of game-changing announcements in recent times - but this year's event promises to be different. A revitalised Microsoft will continue its drive to promote Windows 10 for gaming, while Valve is set to relaunch its delayed Steam Machine platform. We will be presented with two very different visions for the future of PC gaming, and while the specifics of the upcoming clash remain shrouded in mystery some nuggets of information are starting to come to light.

Valve's pursuit of a truly open PC platform led to the beginning of the Steam Machine initiative, prompted by Microsoft's plans to erect a massive walled garden in Windows 8 in the form of the Windows Store. Nothing stopped users from running their own code on the OS of course, but the introduction of a Microsoft app store with Redmond in complete control was a warning shot to Valve, whose Steam platform relies on Windows remaining an open platform. Its response? To put serious resources into a Linux-based PC gaming alternative.

"The big problem that is holding back Linux is games. People don't realise how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behaviour," Valve's Gabe Newell said. "We want to make it as easy as possible for the 2,500 games on Steam to run on Linux as well. It's a hedging strategy. I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we'll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people. If that's true, then it will be good to have alternatives to hedge against that eventuality."

Fighting games are, by their nature, competitive. They're built for player versus player combat. This, for millions of fighting game enthusiasts, is central to their appeal. Mastering combos, learning strategies and putting them into practice online is for many - me included - what the genre is all about.

But not everyone can compete. Not everyone can pull off a 10-hit combo on command. For many, versus mode is an intimidating, often brutal world one dare not step foot in. So what's left? Single-player? Everyone knows single-player in fighting games is an afterthought. Story? Mini-games? Adventure? When it comes to fighting games, forget it.

NetherRealm, maker of Mortal Kombat, has a different idea. In fact, it's had a different idea for a while. I'd say Mortal Kombat delivers story better than any other fighting game, even if it writes to a Saturday morning cartoon template - not that Mortal Kombat is appropriate for a Saturday morning, but, you know.

Last summer's PS4 Battlefield Hardline beta disappointed us with its sub-par frame-rate and a notable lack of visual refinements over Battlefield 4. Surely we should expect more from a triple-A title based on a key franchise? With a new beta released this week, we were eager to see what improvements had been made, based on code that should fall closely into line with the performance profile of the final game, due next month. We've already taken a look at the PC version running on a high-end PC, and it runs as expected but what about the console versions? Have things improved?

Well, the 720p/900p rendering set-ups for Xbox One and PS4 respectively are a genuine disappointment, but the good news is that performance has increased significantly since last year's E3 beta, which often dipped below 40fps in taxing scenes. The big revelation on playing this new code is that overall frame-rates are significantly improved: the urban map from last year's sampler returns, delivering much better performance with minimal dips in frame-rate even during the massive environmental destruction episodes. The new modes all seem to operate very smoothly, maintaining a stable 60fps throughout most of the match.

It's only when returning to Battlefield's classic 64-player Conquest Large mode that familiar problems begin to crop up. Jumping into a full scale battle across the game's new Dust Bowl map - closest in scale to Battlefield 4's larger stages - demonstrates plenty of performance hitches and dips on both consoles, more noticeable on Xbox One but still an issue on PlayStation 4. The prolific use of alpha transparency effects appears to contribute to the issues, but on top of that, it seems that the increased player count causes its own impact to frame-rate too - perhaps because of the increased CPU load.

Please don't tell anyone, but as the months have ticked by, I've slowly but steadily taken to starting work later in the day. Only by a few minutes, mind, but still: I have a guilty pride about those minutes - if you can feel pride and guilt at the same time, which I'm pretty sure you can.

The working day, and please add air quotes as appropriate, begins at 8 at Eurogamer, but I'm generally at my PC by 7.50 playing a certain platforming roguelike that I almost definitely reference too often in articles. I have just a single run-though in the morning, starting from the very beginning, and for a long while, it was all over briskly enough to see me sending emails by 7.55. Now, though, I'm often still playing a little past 8. It is strange for me: one of the only times I can genuinely remember getting better at a game. So novel.

The daily challenge completes Spelunky, I think. It takes a platformer that was merely one of the best games ever made, and it makes it, as far as I am concerned, the definitive greatest game of all time. What's interesting is how it does this. Spelunky is a thing of rules, but the daily challenge belongs to the world of rituals. Spelunky's creatures and items and powers control the flow of the game itself, but the daily challenge controls the flow of Spelunky within your own life. It renders it unmissable. I feel a little bit weird if I skip it. And yet it's just one game per day, so there's no danger of becoming burnt out - or strung out - like my many friends who love Destiny so much.

Stick with the Code Name: STEAM demo that's currently available on the 3DS eStore. It's a slow burner, which is to say that this is a Valkyria Chronicles-style squad-controlling game, and you'll have to play for the best part of an hour before you have much of a squad to control. The early minutes belabour the simple business of explaining turn-based movement and blowing enemies to pieces, and the whole first mission leaves you with just two team members to think about. Don't worry: a full team is coming. The lion is coming.

The lion in question is the famous one - the one out of the Wizard of Oz who felt prematurely defeated by everything life entailed. Luckily, we meet him in Code Name: STEAM after he's had a change of outlook. He's feeling pretty good about things these days. I love this guy: his main attack is called the Lion Launcher, and whoever named it really wasn't screwing around. Study the battlefield, check your corners (whatever that means) and then decide which of your foes you'd like your lion to squish. With a muffled thrump you can send him spinning through the air, sailing across the map and dealing damage to whichever unfortunate soul gets his heavy boots through the face. That's lion logic. I'm trademarking that. (I'm not.)

There's been a lot of chat about Code Name: STEAM's vivid and angular Silver Age artwork, most of it negative. At worst, I think it's wonderfully ugly. I love its luridness, its barely-contained sense of energy. Most of all, though, I love the way it primes you for the zany treats that lie ahead in this unusual game. This, the art style whispers, is the kind of game where a lion might land on you out of the blue. Or where Abraham Lincoln could appear, all of a sudden, wearing a stars-and-stripes trenchcoat and announcing that rumours of his death have been greatly exaggerated. He's on a Steampunk zeppelin when he says this, naturally. A single, brisk "no time to explain" later, and he's off to assist the Queen of England at Buckingham Palace. Aliens are invading. No time to explain.

Best known for its Dead Space trilogy, developer Visceral Games takes the baton - and indeed, the Frostbite 3 engine - from DICE to build a Battlefield universe all of its own. Early access to the multiplayer beta launching today shows that the gameplay has changed in that handover to support its new cops and robbers theme. But as a pure technical exercise, does the maxed-out PC experience leapfrog its predecessor?

It's safe to say that, for its multiplayer component at least, changes to the engine aren't on a monumental scale, based on tests run at ultra settings. Visceral promises that AI is extensively rewritten from the series' military outings, but underneath, the rendering technology is visibly close to that of Battlefield 4's. Reflections rely on a similar mix of real-time and baked-in methods, depending on your perspective of a scene - and the game's HBAO shading still looks odd up close, cutting off the effect at the ends of objects and hands in a way that looks closer to the screen-space approach.

However, despite its quirks, the per-pixel lighting remains gorgeous as ever, and each map design benefits from strong artistic direction. It's worth noting that this beta leans more on medium sized maps, focusing on the LA bustle of Downtown, and the junction surrounding the Bank Job's vaults. That said, given the level of detail iron-pressed into these smaller areas - including the impressive number of destructible elements - they rank among the more adaptive maps we've seen from the series yet.

Metroid has always been a mesh of different DNA: a little of Zelda's exploration mixed in with the acrobatics of Mario and then tied together with some good old fashioned plasma ballistics. Even taking into account that heritage, there was nothing quite like Metroid Prime when it launched in 2002. Coming up to 13 years later, and despite a couple of high quality sequels and almost a decade of increasingly fevered begging from fans, there's been nothing like it ever since.

This is a unique game, and certainly a very special one. Returning to it today - which is now easier than ever thanks to the recent release of Metroid Prime Trilogy on the Wii U's Virtual Console - it's clear that the years haven't dulled its atmosphere or undermined its achievements. If anything, they're brought sharper into focus: as an updating of a 2D classic into three dimensions, the original Prime has earned itself a place alongside Super Mario 64 as one of Nintendo's greats. Alongside the excellent Super Metroid, it's also a high watermark for the space-faring series.

There's much shared between those two games, of course, but nothing's ever merely borrowed in Metroid Prime. Instead it's thoughtfully retooled, reshaped and placed in an all-new template that's every bit as intoxicating as that of the classics it succeeds.

"A man on the road is caught in the act of a becoming. A woman on the road has something seriously wrong with her. She has not 'struck out on her own.' She has been shunned." I remember Vanessa Veselka's
words on female road narratives as I boot up the free game Space Engine.

Ten thousand galaxies live in a tiny folder on my desktop.

The universe lives here. I double click and it expands to fit my screen where I float by undiscovered stars, slip through strange nebulae, linger in the rings of faraway planets just watching the rotation of moons.

Editor's note: We're taking a different approach to reviews of episodic game series like Life is Strange, in which the debut episode will be reviewed without a score, as here, and we'll review the whole season with a score at its conclusion.

The title of Dontnod's episodic adventure is something of an understatement. The first chapter opens with Maxine Caulfield fighting through a tornado to reach a lighthouse. As things reach an apocalyptic crescendo, she snaps back to reality and realises she's actually in her college photography class. Not long after that, she discovers she has the power to rewind time and change events for the better - or worse.

All of this is on top of more traditional late teen tribulations. Maxine is newly returned to the town of Arcadia, Oregon, after five years living in Seattle, an absence that reinforces her feelings of dislocation. Her one-time best friend is now an angry outsider, her nerdy male friend can barely disguise his clumsy romantic intentions and there's a whole labyrinth of dorm etiquette to navigate, from bitchy entitled rich kids to prudish campus Christians and shy outcasts. Flyers regarding missing student Rachel Amber papered all over the college suggest even darker problems lie ahead.

Update: There's been a bit of confusion about the Heart of Thorns beta and my interpretation of what Colin Johanson said.

Here's what he said to me: "What we're going to do, we're going to bring the playable demos to the shows in March. Shortly after that we're going to open up beta testing and we're going to let people play the features and play the content and tell us if the things that we built live up to what we said when we announced."

He's since clarified that he didn't specifically mean an 'open beta' but that beta testing will begin after those game shows in March. It sounds like - judging by what NCSoft said in an email as well - there may be beta events for testing Heart of Thorns. It's not clear whether they'll be open or closed.

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http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1733778Thu, 29 Jan 2015 15:00:00 +0000How FIFA Ultimate Team got its hooks into the spirit of football

A thousand things go into making a person and a lot of them aren't football.

One part of being a young father is remembering with still soft-shelled vulnerability all the anxieties and defeats that shaped the adult you've not quite become. This is OK because you have a few months at least during which it's impractical for children to leave the house alone, time which can be given over to indoctrination and the provision of a map clearly marking all the pitfalls and snares in which some part of you is still trapped.

But then at some point they won't be with you every day, and you won't be able to human-shield them from life and all its happenings. They will enter a room full of other children and begin a life apart from you, and at this point you're powerless except in the preparation already undertaken. And this is why we played FIFA.

With no chance to look at final code for Dying Light on any platform prior to its US release yesterday, it's safe to say that we're still in the early stages of our full multi-platform analysis - but we have played enough of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions to offer up an initial look at game performance.

Running on Chrome Engine 6, Dying Light represents Techland's first efforts on current-gen hardware, with a focus on a truly open city built from assets designed to appear physically correct within the game's lighting system. Early last year, the developers boasted that they were targeting 1080p60 for both consoles but, this past December they rolled back expectations by admitting that 1080p30 was the final target. Previous Techland titles have exhibited somewhat unstable performance, occasionally running fully unlocked with a lot of screen-tear, so anything resembling a smooth, consistent update with a solid 30fps would represent clear progression from the studio.

As things stand, we're seeing a capped 30fps with a soft v-sync solution where torn frames are introduced when the game doesn't quite reach its target update. As an open world title, the performance is quite stable, feeling smooth and solid as you explore the massive environment. There is a tangible difference between the two versions when it comes to performance, though. By and large, the experience on PlayStation 4 is a locked 30fps with very minor dips in certain circumstances - at least based on our first few hours of gameplay, which includes a good amount of time running around the city looking for mayhem.

With just a minute left on the clock, the battle for Hossin is a dead-heat. The jungle-continent is split almost straight down the middle, between shades of red and blue. The heavyweight New Conglomerate faction are just a single point ahead of their lighter, more agile Terran Republic opponents, who are throwing everything they've got right across the NC's front-line. A single captured base would swing it for the Terrans, who dominated the battlefield for almost an hour-and-a-half.

Despite the best efforts of the Terrans, the New Conglomerate line holds, and as the clock ticks down to zero, the entire continent of Hossin flashes blue, heralding their victory. Moments later, another victory is announced, even more significant than the New Conglomerate's own triumph.

On Saturday night, Planetside 2 became the new world record holder for the largest battle to take place in an FPS game. The 1158 players who took part in the Server Smash organised specifically for the attempt officially exceeded the previous record of 999 players, held by the multiplayer shooter Man vs Machine. It was also a stellar example of Planetside 2's eSports potential. Broadcast on Twitch with thousands of spectators, it saw some of the very best Planetside players and outfits partake in a thrilling battle in which the lead changed multiple times, and the ultimate victory went down to the wire.

During her hectic and industrious life, Marie Curie soaked up so much radiation that her bones, if placed on the correct kind of treated plate, would photograph themselves. I read that ages ago anyway; I have no idea if it's true. My own expertise regarding Curie revolves around an earlier period: the wilderness years, the explorer years. You know, the time she spent hacking through the grasslands of Africa and the jungles of South America, limping from one ill-considered leopard fight to another, and trading her donkey, Mrs Rathbone, for a few pieces of chocolate and some shotgun ammo. Poor Mrs Rathbone.

Happily, this is the exact stretch of history covered by The Curious Expedition, which is currently in paid alpha, so you too can become as knowledgeable as me.

Remember the time that Curie, winner of Nobels in both Physics and Chemistry and the force behind the flickering blue glow that lit the way to the 20th century, discovered fire? Well, the time she rediscovered fire, anyway. She was napping by a waterfall and had neglected to douse the embers left from that evening's tea. One night turned into 30 - she was so sleepy! - and when she finally awoke, refreshed, Africa was ablaze in all directions. (Poor Mrs Rathbone.)